The Aluminum Can Economy
Don’t Let Conservatives Move the Goalposts on Welfare Reform
It’s been 20 years to the day since then-President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law, and as my colleague Hanna Brooks Olsen pointed out, we desperately need to reform welfare reform. The supposedly streamlined system Clinton championed has been manipulated into serving dozens of tiny fiefdoms, many of which have nothing to do with serving the intent of welfare. (When you Google “define welfare,” your response is a card that reads “financial support given to people in need,” which seems about as close to a clear, universally accepted definition of the word as I can imagine.)
As soon as welfare reform passed, the conservative war on welfare started again, almost as though nothing happened. And it’s continued ever since. Worse, conservative leaders are trying to change the conversation entirely by arguing that the problem doesn’t exist. Specifically, some conservatives are arguing that welfare reform isn’t needed because poverty doesn’t exist in America.
If you have an angry conservative uncle or you’ve listened to a Fox News panel discussion, you’ve likely heard the argument that poor people in America have it great. “They have computers and cell phones,” the argument goes. “Compared to even the wealthiest people in the 1700s, our poor people live like kings!” This is such a terrible argument because it sounds like it makes internal sense. It is true that if you were to build a time machine and bring a poor person to our time, they would be perpetually flabbergasted. But, uh, time machines don’t exist. And society’s expectations for baseline participation continually change.
The fact is, we expect everyone in America in 2016 to have a cell phone. It’s nearly impossible to get hired for a job now without a phone. Computers are essential parts of the job search process. And it is by no means the sign of a healthy society when we expect our poor people to eat dirt and dress in rags like a peasant from a movie about the Black Plague before we can be expected to provide any sort of a program that would help them get back on their feet.
A recent post by conservative economic lapdog Tim Worstall in Forbes makes an even more specious argument against the existence of poverty than the cell-phone argument. Worstall quotes from a news story that says one San Francisco-area homeless man earns $40 to $50 per day by collecting cans. Worstall latches on to this figure, arguing that “…$40 to $50 a day is not poverty. It is, for example, about the same as the average wage (without adjustment for price differences) in Poland…”
So much to dissect, there. First of all: San Francisco is not Poland, and that “without adjustment for price differences” is a real “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” kind of moment. If you’re talking about income, price differences are just about the most important metric you can consider. It’s not possible to survive in San Francisco—by which I mean attain food, clothing, shelter, and transportation—on $40 a day. That is not a livable wage, if a “wage” is what you call the money collected after picking up cans all day every day.
Worstall consults the World Bank’s definition and says true poverty is an income of $1.90 per day. “There’re some 850 million people out there living on this sort of sum,” Worstall huffs. “This is something rather different from $40 a day from collecting cans. It’s about 20 times different from absolute poverty in fact,” he writes.
So Worstall is trying to argue that our poverty is not so bad since there are enough cans in the greater San Francisco area to earn one homeless person an estimated $40 or $50 per day. He concludes that this homeless person’s experience “tells us that there’s nothing essentially wrong with our system.”
If you agree with Tim Worstall, if you think that abandoned cans should be the bottom-line subsistence program of our society, you probably think that welfare is unnecessary.
But if you believe that a society is a choice, and that one of the central tenets of a society is that people shouldn’t be left to scrounge for a living out of the scraps left by the wealthy, you want a healthy welfare system.
A humane society’s response to suffering should never be “eh, it could be worse.” A humane society should want to help. And in a two-party system like ours, the basic response to poverty—to people who have to scramble to save every cent in order to barely sustain a life that meets the bare minimum contemporary standards of living, and to people who would lose everything if they made one wrong move—should be a system which offers everyone a fair shot at success. A decent welfare system which helps people meet minimum standards, and not a hand-wavey appeal to the pleasures and luxuries of sifting through garbage, should be the basic floor in America.
